Race and Colonialism around 1800: Herder, Fischer, Kleist

ABSTRACT

Herder’s ‘Neger-Idyllen’, Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo, and Caroline Auguste Fischer’s William der Neger offer an exploration of the intersection between race and colonialism in the Atlantic World and in Europe around 1800. Teaching students to read depictions of race, violence, and struggles for emancipation does not only engage with the fraught legacies of the Enlightenment, but, practically speaking, it is also an exercise in suspicious reading. Herder’s anti-imperialist and antislavery poems end with an uneasy negotiation of paternalism. Kleist’s novella provides a racially biased narrator, who limits access to the thought processes of non-white characters. Fischer’s short story moves towards upholding an ideal of emancipation, but recoils from its corollary of revolutionary violence, and crafts two images of its protagonist that cannot be reconciled: one of internalized self-hatred, based on racial identity, the other, of a Christ-like saviour for oppressed peoples.

KEYWORDS:

• race
• colonialism
• emancipation
• revolution
• German literature
• eighteenth century

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Tom Smith and Rey Conquer for providing much-needed critical comments on a blogpost for ‘EGS – Towards an Equitable German Studies’ which served as a basis for this article. I am also grateful to the participants of the panel ‘Teaching the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century’ at the Association of German Studies’ annual conference, hosted by the University of Swansea, in September 2021, who provided invaluable suggestions. Above all, I am grateful to the students of St Hilda’s College, Oxford, who had such insightful observations to make about these texts.

Notes

1 Sarah Colvin, ‘Doing Drag in Blackface: Hermeneutical Challenges and Infelicitous Subjectivity in Courasche, or: Is Grimmelshausen Still Worth Reading?’, Daphnis, 50 (2022), 1–27 (p. 2).

2 EGS <https://egs-uk.org/>; Decolonial Discourses & German Studies <https://decolonialdiscourses.mml.ox.ac.uk/> [both accessed 22 January 2022].

3 Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment: The Pursuit of Happiness, 1680–1790 (London: Lane, 2020), pp. 314–15.

4 Lucy Allais, ‘Kant’s Racism’, Philosophical Papers, 45.1/2 (2016), 1–36; Pauline Kleingeld, ‘On Dealing with Kant’s Sexism and Racism’, SGIR Review, 2.2 (2019), 3–22.

5 Devin Vartija, ‘Revisiting Enlightenment Racial Classification: Time and the Question of Human Diversity’, Intellectual History Review, 31.4 (2021), 603–25.

6 Russell A. Berman, Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 7–10; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003).

7 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 17–23.

8 The German Invention of Race, ed. by Sara Eigen and Mark Larrimore (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006).

9 Todd Kontje, ‘Passing for German: Politics and Patriarchy in Kleist, Körner, and Fischer’, German Studies Review, 22.1 (February 1999), 67–84; Susanne Kord, ‘The Pre-Colonial Imagination: Race and Revolution in Literature of the Napoleonic Period’, in Un-Civilizing Processes? Excess and Transgression in German Society and Culture, ed. by Mary Fulbrook (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), pp. 85–115.

10 Transnational German Studies, ed. by Rebecca Braun and Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2020).

11 Black Central Europe <https://blackcentraleurope.com/> [accessed 22 January 2022].

12 See, for example: Worlding America: A Transnational Anthology of Short Narratives Before 1800, ed. by Oliver Scheiding and Martin Seidl (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).

13 See Peter Martin, Schwarze Teufel, edle Mohren. Afrikaner im Bewußtsein und Geschichte der Deutschen (Hamburg: Junius, 1993), pp. 81–88; pp. 195–204.

14 Marlene Daut, Tropics of Haiti: Race and the Literary History of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World, 1789–1865 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015), pp. 4–10.

15 See, for example: Nick Nesbitt, Universal Emancipation: The Haitian Revolution and the Radical Enlightenment (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2008).

16 Michael Perraudin, ‘Babekan’s “Brille”, and the Rejuvenation of Congo Hoango: A Reinterpretation of Kleist’s Story of the Haitian Revolution’, OGS, 20.1 (1991), 85–103 (pp. 88–89).

17 Heinrich von Kleist, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden, ed. by Ilse-Marie Barth and others, 4 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1987–97), iii: Erzählungen, Anekdoten, Gedichte, Schriften, ed. by Klaus Müller-Salget (1990), p. 222.

18 Kleist, iii, 256. Benjamin Bennett, The Dark Side of Literacy: Literature and Learning Not to Read (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), p. 281.

19 Steven Howe, Heinrich von Kleist and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Violence, Identity, Nation (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), p. 97.

20 Wolfgang Wittkowski, ‘Gerechtigkeit und Loyalität, Ethik und Politik’, KJb (1992), 152–71 (p. 158).

21 Roswitha Burwick, ‘Issues of Language and Communication: Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, GQ, 65.3–4 (Summer/Autumn 1992), 318–27 (p. 320).

22 Kleist, iii, 223.

23 Elystan Griffiths, Political Change and Human Emancipation in the Works of Heinrich von Kleist (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2005), pp. 65–66.

24 Kleist, iii, 233.

25 Ray Fleming, ‘Race and the Difference It Makes in Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, GQ, 65.3/4 (Summer/Autumn 1992), 306–17 (p. 312).

26 Kleist, iii, 223, 241.

27 Kleist, iii, 238.

28 Judith Purver, ‘Passion, Possession, Patriarchy: Images of Men in the Novels and Short Stories of Caroline Auguste Fischer (1764–1842)’, Neophilologus, 79.4 (October 1995), 619–28 (pp. 619–20).

29 Specifically, William der Neger: ‘William the Negro’, trans. by Jeannine Blackwell, in Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830. An Anthology, ed. by Jeannine Blackwell and Susanne Zantop (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), pp. 349–67.

30 Sigrid Weigel, ‘Die nahe Fremde – das Territorium des “Weiblichen”: Zum Verhältnis von “Wilden” und “Frauen” im Diskurs der Aufklärung’, in Die andere Welt: Studien zum Exotismus, ed. by Thomas Koebner and Gerhardt Pickerodt (Frankfurt/Main: Athenäum, 1987), pp. 171–99.

31 Kontje, p. 38.

32 Olivette Otele, African Europeans: An Untold History (London: Hurst & Company, 2020), p. 2.

33 Caroline Auguste Fischer, ‘William der Neger’, in her Kleine Erzählungen und romantische Skizzen: Erster Theil (Posen: Kühn, 1818), pp. 29–73 (p. 33).

34 Fischer, p. 35, 41. The intersection of aesthetic and racial categories is common in the eighteenth century, although it does not always manifest in absolute categories: see Sander L. Gilman, ‘The Aesthetics of Blackness in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Verlobung in St. Domingo’, MLN, 90.5 (October 1975), 661–72 (pp. 665–66); also: Sander Gilman, On Blackness without Blacks: Essays on the Image of the Black in Germany (Boston, MA: Hall and Company, 1982), pp. 27–29.

35 Fischer, pp. 52–53.

36 Wendy Sutherland, Staging Blackness and Performing Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century German Drama (London: Routledge, 2016), pp. 12–31.

37 Fischer, p. 42, 34. There are passing similarities with Kant’s philosophical anthropology here: see Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, ‘The Color of Reason: The Idea of “Race” in Kant’s Anthropology’, in Anthropology and the German Enlightenment: Perspectives on Humanity, ed. by Katherine M. Faull (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1995), pp. 200–41 (pp. 214–15). Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschen (1784–91) makes use of climate theory to explain human diversity — of temperament and of skin colour: see Chunjie Zhang, Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2017), pp. 135–39.

38 Homi K. Bhaba, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 13–27.

39 Fischer, p. 41.

40 Fischer, p. 41.

41 Roger Little, Between Totem and Taboo: Black Man, White Woman in Francographic Literature (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001), p. 46.

42 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, ed. by Wilfried Barner and others, 12 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–2003), iii: Werke 1754–1757, ed. by Conrad Wiedemann (1985), p. 671.

43 Thomas Martinec, ‘Lessing’s Dramatic Theory’, in Lessing and the German Enlightenment, ed. by Ritchie Robertson (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013), pp. 119–37 (p. 131).

44 Christian Daniel Schubart, Teutsche Chronik, Drittes Stück, 8 January 1776, p. 21. The print in question is likely Chodowiecki’s Hafenszene mit zwei Männern, die sich über den Verkauf eines Sklaven handelseinig werden (1776).

45 Friederike Baer, ‘Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart’s Deutsche Chronik and the War of American Independence, 1774–1777’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 38.3 (2015), 443–58 (pp. 446–47).

46 It is for this reason that Herder’s pluralist historicism in Ideen was marked out for praise by Edward Said in his Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 118.

47 Fischer, pp. 43–44.

48 Fischer, p. 62.

49 Fischer, pp. 60–61.

50 See Kord, p. 103.

51 Fischer, pp. 72–73.

52 See John 17. 4.

53 For an account of Herder’s reconceptualization of the idyll, see York-Gothart Mix, ‘“Der Neger malt den Teufel weiß.” J. G. Herders “Neger-Idyllen” im Kontext antiker Traditionsgebundenheit und zeitgenössischer Kolonialismuskritik’, in Das Europa der Aufklärung und die außereuropäische koloniale Welt, ed. by Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2006), pp. 193–207.

54 The most recent and extensive account of Herder’s anti-imperialism is John K. Noyes, Herder: Aesthetics against Imperialism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015).

55 Johann Gottfried Herder, Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. by Jürgen Brammack and Martin Bollacher, 10 vols (Frankfurt/Main: Deutscher Klassikerverlag, 1985–2000), vii: Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, ed. by Hans Dietrich Irmscher (1991), pp. 672–74.

56 Michael N. Forster, Herder’s Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), pp. 224–31.

57 Britta Hermann, ‘Der Fremde und das Mädchen: Heinrich von Kleists Die Verlobung in St. Domingo im literarischen Kontext’, Zeitschrift für interkulturelle Germanistik, 5.1 (2014), 29–50 (p. 39).

58 Ingeborg H. Solbrig, ‘American Slavery in Eighteenth-Century German Literature: The Case of Herder’s “Neger-Idyllen”’, Monatshefte, 82.1 (Spring 1990), 38–49 (p. 47).

59 Angela Kuhk, Vielstimmige Welt: Die Werke St. John de Crèvecœurs in deutscher Sprache (Münster: LIT, 2001), pp. 119–20; see also: Angela Sanmann, ‘“The Exercise of a Just Love of Humanity”: Sophie von La Roche as Female Cosmopolitan’, Women’s Writing, 27.1 (2020), 11–28.

60 Herder, vii, 684–85.

61 Christian Moser, ‘Aneignung, Verpflanzung, Zirkulation: Johann Gottfried Herders Konzeption des interkulturellen Austauschs’, Edinburgh German Yearbook, 1 (2007), 89–108 (pp. 104–05).

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Joanna Raisbeck

Joanna Raisbeck is Stipendiary Lecturer in German at St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford. Her first monograph, Karoline von Günderrode: Philosophical Romantic, based on her doctoral thesis, is forthcoming with Legenda. Her research interests encompass the interactions between literature, philosophy, and science of the long eighteenth century.